That Early American Quality

by CONRAD RICHTER

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A SURPRISING number of us believe today that you and I are still the original American product , union made and established in 1776, Hollywood and best-selling novelists have helped the legend. It is so much easier to casl familiar modern persons in old-time roles than the difficult and authentic departed forefather. These modern characters are our ancestors, we are told. This is the way it was. The characters wear costume and sometimes speak historic words. But that’s really about as far as most of them get into valid early American life and feeling. The situations in which they find themselves and their manner of behavior and response are as modern as the motorcar.

Meanwhile the true character and nature of our vanished ancestors have grown so strange and unknown to later generations of Americans as to be almost foreign and unreal. Already the Western horseback pioneers of no more than fifty and sixty years ago are vastly altered, cheapened, dressed up. They are scarcely recognizable by one who knew them. And yet they are commonly accepted. The present generation knows no other. Modern historians, caught in the complicity of expedience and self-defense, repeat that the American character has not changed. We may wear different clothes, but if you look at us closely you will still see the number thirteen riding boots of George Washington. So the later Romans, looking back on the days of Caesar and Pompey, must have spoken longingly and tragically to each other at some steep and dangerous dip in their decline.

Our fault has not been so much the betrayal of our forefathers as the shortsighted abandonment of a vital thing that might have kept us on the track. Some of the bounties of those early Americans we try to keep alive today— free speech, trial by jury, separation of church and state. But the most precious thing, the temper of the men who produced and established these bounties and privileges, has been ignored.

Our newer generations are scarcely aware that there was such a temper, only a mind. They see the new pictures, read the new books. The musty old books, the dusty fine-print historical collections, the opinions of men who lived and observed on the spot, they seldom see. They take for granted the supremacy of their modern world. They observe clerks streaming from office buildings at five and laborers from industrial plants at four. They think clerks and laborers were always like that; not nearly so well off, of course, but with the same expressionless faces. Indeed ihey must have been a lot duller. Didn’t they have to work in the old days until six at night and start at some unholy hour in the morning!

I have no notion that anything I say will much disturb their thinking. People believe today what they wish to believe or are told, not necessarily what is true or likely to be true. We are told and we want desperately to believe that we are still undiluted and unchanged Americans. And yet an observant man approaching sixty years of age may have seen with his own eyes during his lifetime, as I have, great changes in American character. A few years ago I interviewed many old-time men and women who patiently told me things of their early life I wished to know. It was plain then that there had been not only a considerable change between that time and the time when I was a boy, but between my youth and the youth of these old men and women. It was also obvious, while I was working among old records in libraries, that farther back there had been still earlier changes. Indeed change has been apparently the one constant factor in American life and character.

In the eighteen-fifties a homesick native American made a pilgrimage. We think of nostalgia for the good old days as illusory because it has occurred at various stages in our history. But it has occurred at these stages because of the historic presence of actual successive changes in American life. This man was looking for a kind of people he had known in his youth and prime, He had come to Ohio as a boy and spent his life among the early pioneers who had cut down the heavy forests and turned them into farms.

Now he was an old man. The breed he had known were mostly in their graves. The current present generation had changed. He had heard that out in Wisconsin and Minnesota pioneers were then cutting down the forests and plowing up the new land for farms. He reasoned that there he would find his own generation still alive. It had simply moved farther west. He wanted to see and talk to his own kind again before he died. He went to these places and traveled about, seeking hopefully. In the end he came back to Ohio a defeated and wiser man. He told the few of his kind that survived that the forests and stump farms were there, but the people were quite different. Times had changed. Their own race had been swallowed up. He believed that it would never be seen on earth again.

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SAVE in research I never knew the particular type of pioneer this man sought. But I understand how he felt. There were still abundant in my youth certain types of American that today in their turn have almost disappeared from our scene. These types, now that I look back on them, appeat to have had one thing in common. It was a kind of hardihood and vigor beside which most Americans seem soft and squeamish today.

For example, when I was a boy, coal miners from our town left for work on miners’ t rains at four and five o’clock in the morning. On arriving at the mines they went underground for the day’s work. At five and six o’clock that night the trains returned. To my never failing delight as a small boy, 1 he miners left their trains on the run. Also, they would run part of the way home, although some of them lived three and four miles in the country. It was a common thing to see a whole trainload of black-faced men jogging like an immense football squad down the street, their empty dinner buckets and coffee kettles on their arms. It was a sight that seldom failed to energize me.

But Americans were more easily energized then. When I was in the lower grades, the high school boys spent half their nights in the vigorous sport of playing deer, or hare and hounds. They would run for miles through the dark countryside, racing over hills and finding their way through inky black woods. The energetic practice has ceased. But I still remember gratefully the triumph of their spirits and bodies over the rough terrain, like deer.

There was another type of American in my youth, who almost never ran. Yet I think he held up the peculiar early American trait of vigor and temper more than any other. If you were born before the turn of the century you may recognize him. No single word ever completely describes a man, but there is one that gives us a good idea. The word has disappeared from the current scene almost as generally as the man it typifies. That word is manliness. I do not mean physique. Some of those I knew were small men, but you instantly felt the quality I mean, a sort of independent, sometimes crabbed hardihood that stood up for its rights and took you on at any odds. It was a quality of mind and spirit rather than of body, still more of creed and belief. An early nineteenth century American once told a visiting European, “We have no king over here. Every man is his own king.” The kind of man I refer to had been brought up to believe it. Often poor, perhaps uneducated and in homespun, he considered himself sovereign of his own life and domain. He acted like a sovereign, and if you wanted his respect, he expected you to be the same.

I recall a pair of these men I saw as late as the nineteen-twenties. They were walking down the dirt road of a Pennsylvania backwoods valley where I lived. It was in the late afternoon. Around six o’clock that morning they had tramped four miles to work. They had spent the day at hard labor. Now they were walking the four miles home. What held me was the way they moved, like rude backwoods kings, in the middle of the road and the devil take the car behind them. Just the way they set down their feet and held their heads told of a flow of blood and vitality of life that now after twenty-five years straightens me and gives me joy to recall it. They were perhaps in their forties. I have seen very old men with the same unconquered spirit. They would go to their Maker soon, but until then they would be men. You can see a few of these in the Civil War sketches of Winslow Homer.

Not all of this type were laborers. Some were in the professions, gentlemen. Many were farmers. They were to be found among blacksmiths, millers, bridge builders, squires, stoneworkers, drovers, tradesmen. I knew several such merchants, but butchers were the most extreme and magnificent specimens of the breed. Powerful, doughty Hectors standing in their boots, they scraped and smiled not for customer or sheriff. Schoolmasters, too. In my youth I have been deservedly shaken by more than one man teacher who in his day feared neither pupil, parent, nor politician. But they in turn were weaklings beside an earlier principal my mother and father spoke about with admiration and affection till they died. He was legendary, his discipline kingly, and yet such was his power that he neither beat nor shook. Even his enemies respected him.

I would not have you believe that all these men were noble like the latter. There were some despots and even a few public drunkards among them. Many of this type were unlovely in this or that respect. The important thing was that they had the indispensable early American quality. The greatest fundamental quality of a nation is men. And the greatest fundamental quality of men is manhood. You can build understanding, culture, and progress on manhood, but you can never build manhood on mere intelligence, culture, and progress. Character strength and manhood are from within.

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WHAT these early Americans had that so many of us today do not have are a sense of sovereignly, a rank vitality, and a deep unswerving belief in the dignity of man, beginning with themselves. We use this phrase a great deal today, but what we mean is something else — privileges, rights, comforts. The vigorous, sometimes crusty, old-time Americans of this type had dignity of man bred in the bone. It was their creed. Their home, farm, shop, or merely the place where they stood was their castle. When they spoke, it was with strong, often rude conviction. They didn’t believe in flattery. Their loyalty was great, but they had a greater respect for discipline and training. For your own good they let you work your way out of your ordinary difficulties. Once your burden became too heavy, no one was quicker to help. If you offered them moneys they were insulted. Their friendship wasn’t for sale. They were slow to recognize a man’s worth, often willful, stubborn and shrewd, upon occasion arrogant, and some even piratical and cruel. But I have seldom seen them frightened, cowed, bewildered, beaten down by life, running with the sheep.

They went to their graves as they had lived, sometimes leaving explicit and tyrannical wills. That was their right and duty, they supposed. They believed in liberty for themselves and for you, if you owned any belief in it yourself. Americanism to them meant independence, and they couldn’t get enough of it.

As a boy I knew many of them. They did not lay hands on my head and say what a nice child I was. The most they gave me was a shrewd appraising glance, after which they held their tongue and judgment, It was up to me to prove myself. Both my grandfathers were such men. Far from being baby-sitters or child-spoilers, they were men into whose presence grandchildren went with considerable awe or at least hesitation. If they were agreeable to a grandchild, it was a mark of being singled out. My mother and father felt it an honor when my mother’s father, a tall gaunt man like Lincoln, called at their house. He was a parson widely known for his dry humor and relentless travels by horseback and buggy to serve a wide mountain and country area. It took two churches and an overflow service, all at the same time, to hold the mourners at his funeral. And yet I never recall him taking the slightest notice of me or my brothers. My other grandfather once when I was a boy paid me the great compliment of drawing me a glass of tap water with his own hand. It made a great impression on me.

But by the time my father came along, times were changing. He had the virtues of the older generation. Until his thirties he was a storekeeper and would open the store at six in the morning, close it at nine or ten at night. He handled heavy barrels of molasses alone and once a week would drive a three-horse wagon of provisions to the mining patches.

Last summer an elderly coal miner with an Irish accent told me he had read The Sea of Grass. “That colonel in there,”he said, “didn’t you have your father in mind when you wrote it?" I was a little startled.

But my father was not so severe as my grandfathers. I he rugged old American breed was declining. He could be very entertaining and jovial, especially to visitors and other children than his own. A kind of manly reserve remained between him and his sons, none of which has his vitality and vigor. The blood has thinned out, and I for one can say it has not been to our advantage.

This process of thinning, declining, or civilizing, if you wish, has been going on from Maine to California, but it has been slower in Maine as it has in Vermont, Texas, and a few other hardier states. The causes of the decline have been fairly guessed at. But I have heard less speculation into the causes of the strong product in the first place. What made him that way originally? What were the sources of his character? Can we moderns in our great need for vitality and fortitude today learn from some of the things that shaped our grandfathers?

It is a curious sidelight on our modern democracy that the common man today is considered a clod beside the expert. Let him be a pauper, and he is showered with attention, but pauper or independent, he is unimportant except in the aggregate. Outside of voting, polling, and giving testimony in court, his opinions are unworthy, his knowledge and experience obsolete. As in Russia, he must recant the old and embrace the new, or his earthy, stubborn mind can expect to be liquidated. In most fields the expert is dictator. He revises history in the light of modern knowledge and propaganda. He proves that what took place in some past age was in reality something quite different from that recorded by contemporary observers; that when a historical participant said one thing, he often meant another.

Our forefathers held the belief, oflen stated, that the virtues of their characters such as they had, were the result of their conflict with the wilderness, with hardship and privation. Even the second and third generations attributed their “snap and dash" to their inheritance from pioneer fathers. In our day Arnold Toynbee has pointed out the historical growth of nations that had to fight adversity as compared with the decline of those provided with comfort and prosperity. But privation grows less and less popular with every modern political campaign. It seems that discipline and privation are conditions that must be established by Providence and are not readily self-imposed by ease-loving Americans. If this is true, we need not complain at what inescapable difficulties now confront us. We asked for them, but we didn’t think that Providence was listening.

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THERE were other strengthening influences than privation and hardship in our ancestors’ day. One of these undoubtedly was their robust religion. Skeptics and unbelievers flourished as now, but the religious were actually religious, not merely good or humane. Their beliefs, often narrow and sometimes bigoted, supported them. Where today will you find a traveler in a hotel getting down on his knees in his nightshirt to pray before getting into bed with a stranger as in Emerson’s time? Where, oh, where is the landlord of the inn, who stands at the head of his table to pray aloud before starting to carve? Indeed where is the house that prays before meals at all? In my youth I had to endure long and sometimes terrible prayers at every table under which I was invited to stow my legs. I recall some of them as almost unintelligible, filled with groans. It was very hard for one boy to keep his face straight, doubly hard for two. But today I understand those enigmatie prayers better.

I have found that hypocrites’ prayers, like their conversation, are generally fluent, under control. The groans and moans and dark unfathomable phrases were, on the other hand, symptoms of a deep inarticulate fervor and passion, an acknowledgment of unspoken hardship and suflering, of yearning and perhaps of secret sin.

A less-considered source of strength among our earlier citizenry was the custom that I may call oratorical enlargement. By this I mean the hearty and profound vigor of thought and phrase in olden times. It is obsolete and considered inexcusably flowery today. It was employed generally by the better classes, but the lower classes had their own variety. A man was “a man for a’ that,”“one of nature’s own noblemen,” “a rough diamond” or “a worthless and rascally specimen of the human race.” A woman was “of the fair sex,” “a lady to her finger tips ‘' or “a common miserable hussy,” both common and miserable having different meanings then than now. Men were “profoundly penetrated.” They felt “the iron enter the soul.” They said such things as “ fear is a stranger to his bosom,”“add to the courage of the lion the sagacity of the fox,” and “give me liberty, or give me death.”It was not all affectation. Many of our forefathers actually saw and fell things in this deep-energy manner, the classic frame of mind of heroes from Ulysses to Abraham Lincoln. It took a robust man to look on the world in such a fashion. His powerful thought and expression produced in turn strong currents of energy that further stirred and supported him. As sovereign man’s heroic cast declined, his speech declined also. It would seem silly for the kind of men that we are to speak in that manner today. We are better fitted to say “ Phoney!" and “Nuts!”

I have sometimes speculated on another possible source of old-time manliness. Its age reached into my boyhood. I mean when man lived more in the sight and companionship of the nobler animals. It happened that the braver of my grandfathers was all his life a rider and driver of horses, while my less courageous if blunt-spoken grandfather was employed in his youth taking care of sheep. You may well believe this a coincidence. However, the most manly class left in our country today is of the West and of farms where the horse is still in active use. The horse has always had, I suspect, its effect on men. A handful of Spaniards with horses vanquished the entire Mexican civilization. When I was a boy there were always horses on the street, some of them spirited and unpredictable, and I can promise you the street was a more exciting place then. We looked with especial interest and delight on certain driving horses we knew, some of them high-steppers. They gave us the feeling they might bolt at a moments notice. The driver, sometimes a laxly or boy, bad to be alert and hold them in. Tension and spirit were in the air‚ made life richer and pulses a little faster. Even a team of slow, powerful, and well-matched draft horses stirred physical admiration and a certain setup in the energies of the beholder. Who today feels excitement or even takes a second look at a passing car or truck!

I do not mean to limit man’s animals to the horse. I have a suspicion that many an old-time country boy has been bucked up unsuspectingly by the familiar sight of the common barnyard rooster who from early morning till dark used to stalk about with his head high, his gaudy flags flying, and every step perky. Alway s ready to fight, he was the picture of audacity and energy, mettle and valor. Today we have traded the companionship of the braver animal that uplifts for the companionship of the mechanical and inanimate that dull. Those living breeds we do continue we have transformed into weaker strains for meat, milk, eggs, and especially docility. Our ancestors would have scorned them. They preferred the challenging company of the spirited horse, the wild longhorn steer, and the gander that could put a boy to rout.

Early American character had other nourishment, I think, in rude educational freedom. There is in Pennsylvania a certain small rustic county. Today I do not know a single large town in it, not even the county seat. Yet a hundred years ago there were in ihis backwoods county a surprising number of private academies in farmhouses, basements, barns, and other buildings. They were supremely individual, marked by the mastership and ideas of one man. Their curriculum in the light of modern education might seem crude and fundamental. But they more than made up for it in the passion with which they taught Americanism and in the diversity of their product. Students were not turned out in the hurried mass production of our high schools, indoctrinated with one specialized system of ideas so that they might be easy prey both to life’s difficulties and to any one political propaganda. Rather, all these small schools, considered together, turned out a product so divergent, nonconformist, and robust in its learning and beliefs that it could defy any one political dictation. They gave a vigorous hybrid mixture to the mind of our citizenry like linsey-woolsey to cloth, and as coal, ore, and limestone fused together make iron.

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A FINAL influence on old-time character to be mentioned here, and one most to be disputed by moderns, is continence. That well-known poll of men who were willing to talk about their sexual prowess asserts that Americans were always like they are today. As one who has spent a good deal of time in the study of early American life, I would say that this is a grave reflection on the authenticity of the rest of the report. The implication is untrue.

There have always been aggressive American nudes, fewer then than now, I believe, but still a great many. However, our early form of society had a number of strong restraints that are not in effect today. One was the much higher chastity of unmarried girls and women, due to upbringing, religion, society safeguards, custom, and to the fairly sure shame in case of forced marriage. Married women were more virtuous for some of the same reasons. Perhaps a larger deterrent was the absence in those clays of sexually exciting entertainment. The burlesque show was tame, almost puritanical, beside today’s Broadway play and musical comedy, not to mention floor shows. Love songs in my youth were austere and prudish compared with the thinly veiled declarations of desire and proposals of hit-and-run consummation today. There were, of course, for our forefathers no movies‚ and when I was a boy we had little liquor consumption by youth. In my own home town, drinking by older men, always heavy, has if anything decreased, but drinking by youth and women has since then increased more than a thousand per cent.

The most effective restraint, however, was something else, in my opinion. Forty years ago I was a young reporter. Something happened in the news, I forget what, but a prominent physician commented to me privately on the unwillingness of his married women patients for the wifely duty, He said it was his greatest single complaint. Today, with the abundance of contraceptives and of erotic print and pictures, the situation has changed so that the pursued has often become the pursuer and manhood’s most ardent impoverisher.

There was restraint on man’s side, too. He was ignorant perhaps of the hardy Arab nomad who scorned the sex habits of his weaker brother in the towns. But he knew from first or second hand the indifference of the red man to woman’s charms and his degree of physical hardihood and courage that only those whites who practiced Indian ways could hope to match.

There has been room here to mention only one or two changes in American character. Many such changes could have been cited. If I were to try to sum up in a few words the most fundamental and far-reaching change from our forefathers’ character to ours, I should say it was the tendency, the method, of the modern world to relieve. If you have desire, relieve yourself. If you have trouble with your wife, relieve yourself of her legally or clandestinely. If you are tired, relieve your body , slouch, prop up your feet. If you are nervous, relieve yourself of responsibility, work, morals, religion. If you have enemies, relieve yourself of fear of them by appeasement. It is a process of lowering the evolutionary and manly standard that our ancestors so laboriously built up. Despite modern medical names, it is pure escape as when a man who irks under the restraints and difficulties of civilized life goes native at Santa Fe or Tahiti and feels the relief of reducing his standards to a more primitive and less demanding existence.

The old-fashioned method was more stubborn and audacious. Its effort was to overcome. Endure, bear, fight the good fight! Win if you can. If you can’t, try again. The possibility of breaking was not unrecognized by our forefathers. The Forty-niners wrote on their wagons, “California or bust!” Some of them did. However, from the statistics, they did not break nearly so frequently as victims of the modern method. The sustained summoning of effort and energies built up in some mysterious way the spiritual and physical reservoirs of men and women. It produced that breed whose record so dwarfs us spiritually and physically today.